Introducing Frontend Observability

Let’s face it – a website’s performance is directly tied to business success. Slow page loads, frustrating errors, and clunky interfaces don’t just annoy users; they drive them away and hurt the bottom line. Your website or apps are the front door to your business. And just like a physical storefront, first impressions matter. A lot.

But how do you really know what users are experiencing? That’s why we’re excited to introduce Frontend Observability, to help you understand exactly what your users experience when they interact with your applications.

Why Frontend Observability Matters

Modern web applications have gotten super complex. Users access your site from countless different devices, browsers, or geo locations. With so much happening on the frontend, there’s a lot that can go wrong.

Traditional monitoring only tells part of the story. The truth is, you could have a perfectly running backend while your users are struggling with slow page loads, JavaScript errors, or unresponsive interfaces. Frontend Observability bridges this gap by connecting what happens in your users’ browsers and mobile apps with what’s happening on your backend services and infrastructure.
Frontend Observability includes Browser Real User Monitoring (BRUM) and Synthetic Monitoring, both of which are available today, while Mobile Real User Monitoring (MRUM) is available in private preview.

Real User Monitoring for Instant Insights into User Experience

Right out of the box, Observe provides an overview of how the website is performing. Key metrics include total page views, load-time distribution (with breakdown), and error rate. You can instantly slice and dice data by country, OS, browser, etc. to narrow the impact or understand performance by a specific dimension.

Dig Deeper with Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page. It is not only important to keep track of Core Web Vitals for an optimal user experience, but these metrics are important contributors to Google search results. 

• Time to First Byte (TTFB): How quickly your website responds to requests
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): When your page’s largest content is loaded
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): How responsive your site is to user interactions
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How stable your page is as it loads

Geo Mapping to Understand Website Traffic

By mapping out where your visitors come from, you can quickly spot if an outage is isolated to a particular location or if there’s a sudden burst of traffic from one spot. This provides key business and application performance insights and also helps you narrow down where to focus your troubleshooting efforts.

Performance Breakdown

You can track the performance of your web application right from the moment a user request is initiated – the time it takes in DNS resolution, time spent in making a request, processing and loading the page with a clear breakdown so you can measure and optimize performance.

Transaction Drill Downs

Drilling down into a specific transaction that shows anomalous behaviour in load times, or errors gives details about location, browser, OS, and time spent in completing the transaction.

You can also look at performance using Waterfall providing a sequential breakdown of a page load, allowing developers to pinpoint performance bottlenecks and understand how different resources and network requests contribute to the overall user experience.

Correlate with Backend Traces

You can correlate a specific transaction on the front end with the backend trace that fulfilled the request!

No matter where an anomaly arises—anywhere in your application stack or on the user side—Observe provides rapid detection, troubleshooting, and resolution.

Instrumenting Mobile Applications with OpenTelemetry

While the general goal of RUM—capturing user-centric performance data—remains the same, monitoring mobile applications differs in important ways from monitoring browser-based experiences. MRUM requires adding an SDK or library into the mobile application code (iOS, Android, or cross-platform frameworks) to get deeper insights about app performance and stability.

Observe gives complete flexibility to our customers in instrumenting their mobile apps with either OpenTelemetry upstream SDKs – for iOS and Android, or using OpenTelemetry compliant Embrace SDKs and export telemetry data using OTLP to Observe. Using OpenTelemetry SDKs gives complete control to our customers with vendor-neutral and a standard-based approach for data instrumentation and collection.

Observe provides out of the box visibility into how mobile applications are performing with drill down into application, device, OS details, spans, traces as well as pivoting to contextual logs from applications. 

Continuous Observability with Synthetics

By continuously testing APIs, user flows, and endpoints, synthetic tests catch potential issues before they affect actual customers. Once again, our customers get complete flexibility in running synthetic tests– using OpenTelemetry Collector or cloud providers and partners’ point of presence locations. Customers can test API or application endpoints using OpenTelemetry HTTP Check Receiver and export response data with desired transformations to Observe. Our native integration with cloud providers such as AWS App also provides pre-built dashboards and the ability to create monitors on synthetic test results from one central point.

Getting Started is Easy

Frontend Observability uses open-source agents and OpenTelemetry-based SDKs, so there’s no vendor lock-in. You can start collecting user experience telemetry with minimal changes to your codebase.

For Browser RUM, simply add our JavaScript snippet to your application. For Mobile RUM, include OpenTelemetry or Embrace SDKs into your Android or iOS apps. And setting up Synthetic Monitoring is as simple as defining the endpoints and user flows you want to test in OpenTelemetry Collector or partner point of presence locations. 

If you have not already done so, give Observe a spin by signing up for a free trial and start understanding and improving the real user experience today! To see Frontend Observability in action, join us in a live webinar where we will show how Frontend Observability helps teams resolve issues faster.